Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Well, it's getting close now. The course maps remain the same and can be found here. Ryan is still planning on cheering for us (drinking beer and watching football) and I told him transition opens at the same time as the bar, 10 am. Race starts at 11. If you need a Y day pass, let me know and I'll take care of it (my wife works there).

Transitions will be in my garage. Remind me to give everyone the door code in the event Ryan isn't there yet and someone accidentally closes the door. That would make for a funny DNF story, but wouldn't be too funny at the time :-). BTW, my house is your house for the race. With that said, I'm not cleaning or doing anything special :-).

I'll provide water, ice, (and any nutrition I happen to have), orange slices, and pretzels (and any thing in my pantry if you get desperate). I meant to order some Ironman Perform drink, but never got around to it so if you want a sports drink, the race will be BYOSD.

For dinner, I'm still looking at bacon wrapped fillets, spicy red potatoes and probably stuffed peppers. If you have any requests let me know. I could use a dinner count (so I know whether to trim one or two beef tenderloins), so if you plan on making it, please let me know (that includes the non-racers I invited and racer families off course).

If you have any requests or questions, let me know. If it goes well, maybe we can make it a little bigger event next year. If not, maybe we'll turn it in to a barbecue instead.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Things are coming together for my private HIM, though I still need to clean the transition area. The shirts arrived last week and look ok. The line between the black ink and white shirt seems a little fuzzy, hopefully that is just loose material that will fall away after the first washing. I'm ready to do this race and start the off season.

Starting the taper. Today's brick was a little rough. I had aches and pains on all three sports including two where I said, "that has never hurt before" which got me thinking that I've said that more in the last two years than I have my whole life. I suspect many endurance athletes experience the same thing, specially when they reach middle age.

Good weekend of s/b/r/c (swim/bike/run/cook). My parents and MIL visited this weekend. It's always nice to have them visit and gives me an extra excuse to cook. It ended up being a triple cookout weekend including firing up the smoker. I don't smoke meat often because it is an event between the prep, and the length of time it takes to smoke meat, but the outcome is usually fantastic. Cheryl told me I was smoking chicken to have pulled chicken, so four chickens were the first batch of meat smoked. Then I smoked six pounds of salmon (2/3's of that was for neighbor's). As long as I have the smoker going, we might as well fill it up.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

I made a tough choice a couple months ago. Race Branson 70.3 or go to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival this weekend. They are opposite extremes of two things I like to do. I chose "anti-training" and had an absolute blast. I went with a friend from work (Larry), his friend Bill and one of my college roommates, also Bill.

Larry is a real student of bourbon. He studies every thing about different bourbons, distilleries, master distillers, etc. It was really fun watching someone passionate about something be in the holy land. Larry struck up conversations about bourbon with lots of total strangers and had a blast.

One of the cool buildings on the grounds Maker's Mark

The weekend consisted of walking around the festival grounds, sampling bourbon, touring distilleries and playing poker. Perfect for a group of middle aged guys! We toured three distilleries, Heaven Hills, Maker's Mark, and Jim Beam. Each tour was interesting and we learned something new each time. The smell of evaporating bourbon in the rick houses was pleasant. Each rick house holds 20,000+ barrels of bourbon where the barrels will sit for between two and 17+ years while they age. Each barrel weighs 500 pounds so the wood structures are pretty sturdy. Interesting engineering info is that the rick houses have plumb bobs in the corners which the workers use to make sure the weight in the rick house is distributing evenly.

One of the rick houses at Heaven Hills

Another rick house

A couple stills at Maker's Mark

We had a great weekend of teasing each other which made for a really funny trip. It's not often I laugh as hard as I did on this trip. Besides the ribbing, we also did random funny stuff. How random? We'll be chuckling about this one for a long time and every time we play cards for the rest of our lives. While walking around town we walked past a dirty, old little girls shoe sitting at the bottom of a light post. After walking by it countless times on Friday, I picked it up without the guys noticing. Then on Saturday night there was a big hand between me and Larry. After he raised me I said "I call" and with a perfect delivery "and re-raise one small child's shoe". I'm crying giggling just typing this. Priceless. Oh, and I still have the shoe. I predict it will be bet again in the future......

Sunday, September 11, 2011

My ride today started off much like all my other rides. The weather was a little better than normal and being at the end of a recovery week I was feeling a little stronger than normal. It was nice to only run for an hour yesterday instead on two. The wind wasn't in a good direction to PR the loop but I decided I would ride a little harder than normal. Once I got going, all the random stuff started going through my mind like usual. If you've ever run or rode for more than an hour, you know what I'm talking about. Today was no different. I ran sound at church today, so the songs were going through my head, then I started thinking about what I was going to cook, then about the week ahead at work, then 9/11.

No big deal at first. I remembered where I was, what I was thinking, etc. Then I started thinking more about it. I was thinking the firefighters had a hard day ahead of them, but they are studs and that's what they do. Instead of going into a burning house and saving people, they first had to climb 90 flights of steps carrying a hundred pounds of gear, then start saving people. It was going to be a long hard day for them, but at the end of the day, they would be home having a nice meal with their family before going to sleep exhausted. I never once thought the towers would collapse. I never once thought people would start jumping out of the buildings.

The firefighters were going up while everyone else that could was going down.

The more I thought about 9/11, the sadder I became and the harder I pedaled. I was thinking to myself that I really don't know what hard is. What the emergency personnel did on 9/11 was hard. Riding my bike is not hard. I am so fortunate to be free and about half way through the ride I decided to dedicate the ride to the emergency personnel that responded on 9/11.

Despite multiple traffic stops and unfavorable wind, I did PR the ride....

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Things are coming together for the private HIM October 2nd. It looks like we'll have four racers. Cheryl asked how many people were racing and I said four, me, Kate, and a couple guys I met on the Internet :-).

I have some work to do getting the transition area/aid station area together. It's a bit of a mess right now.

needs a little work

Training has been going fairly well. I had an 11 mile hot run Saturday and felt strong for most of it. I did start running out of gas at the end and actually started to walk at at about mile 10. The mental challenge began. Funny things go through your mind after running an hour and 45 minutes in 95 degree heat. Lots of mental games. A million reasons why to stop, very few why to keep going. When I get to this place, I sometimes think about a story I've shared before. Sometime about 10 years ago a neighbor kid was walking by pushing a tractor and talking to himself. I don't remember exactly what he was saying anymore except for the punch line. He said, "c'mon Mr. Rabbit it's just me and you and you push". Cracks me up every time :-). BTW, that kid now runs an 18 minute 5k in high school. Back to my run, I won.....

On to some cooking news. I had a couple friends at work tell me about a couple simple recipes this week so I figured I would try them. The first was grilled tomatoes. Cut the tomatoes in half, brush on some olive oil, put on some cracked pepper then five minutes per side with the last couple covered in cheese. I used an Italian blend of Mozzarella, Parmesan, Provolone and spices. It was simple to make and tasted fantastic!

yum, tomatoes!

The second recipe was grilled peaches. Cut the peaches in half and pit them. Grill them open side down for a couple minutes then skin side down for a couple minutes. Then drizzle some honey and coat with granola. These turned out pretty good too.